Chicana por mi Raza

Reviewed by: Kelly Karst

Review start: February 7, 2024

Review last updated: February 16, 2024

Site Link: https://chicanapormiraza.org/

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/WuvhJ

Data Sources

• Oral histories on film
• Biographies
• Historias (Research essays)
• Timelines
• Story Maps
• Photographs
• Speeches (in written format)
• Correspondence
• Event posters

Processes

• Traveling across the United States to collect oral histories on films
• Converting films to YouTube
• Scanning and digitizing personal archives
• Processing digitized archives to upload and be discoverable
• Students writing biographies
• Researchers writing “Historias” or research essays
• Researching within and outside the site to create timelines and Story Maps

Presentation

A main website is searchable and is also a portal to access the Mujeres student biographies, the Chicana Diasporic Scalar research hub, Historias research essays, recent uploads, and visualizations. The Chicana Diasporic hub allows users to search its contents or browse through a curated and themed table of contents or index.

Digital Tools Used

• YouTube
• Scalar

Languages

• English
• Spanish (occasional within specific archived items and official names of organizations, works, etc.)

Review

The Chicano Movement, also known as the Movimiento was a Mexican American civil rights movement within the 1960s and 70s that worked together to fight racial discrimination, work towards empowerment and civil rights, uplifting the youth, and at time calling for reclaiming Aztlan, U.S. territory in the Southwest that was once part of present-day Mexico. Perhaps most widely known from the movement are the powerful labor strikes by the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California led by prominent figures Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. The Chicano Movement still loosely exists today with an emphasis on addressing human rights concerns for those crossing the U.S./Mexico border to immigrate to the United States ("Chicano Movement").

Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collectiveis a collaborative initiative formed in 2009 to safeguard the narratives of Chicanx and Latinx communities during the Movimiento while spotlighting women’s voices from the moment. Spearheaded by Professor Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant, the project has undertaken extensive oral history collection efforts across numerous states, amassing hundreds of hours of interviews with significant figures and allies while utilizing volunteer and student support. Currently, their digital repository hosts approximately 7,000 accessible records and over 500 interview clips, with ongoing efforts to digitize and upload thousands more archival items.

The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective is a clear labor of love that continues to bring a scholarly community together to both learn from and contribute to the site while also serving as a useful pedagogical tool for the wider Chicanx public and K-12 schools. Though the site is not difficult to navigate, it is not clear how to access the digitized archival collection outside of discovering items within larger content such as essays, the timelines, and story maps. There is a further disconnect in what is searchable on the main website versus the Chicana Diasporic research hub. Users will need to know to search within both portals to make the most out of their search experience, and also be aware of where to search as the site search is located in the footer of the main page, and one must scroll past the Chicana Diasporic explanation to actually access the hub. The site could have a more cohesive search experience with a dedicated catalog, but this would require at minimum the expertise and labor of a trained Librarian or Archivist and possibly the purchase of cataloging software. Upkeep may continue to be an issue as evidenced by broken embedded timelines. The visual layout of each section differs in consistency, which may have the user wondering if they are still viewing works from the same organization. However, within each section the information is laid out in an organized and easy to follow manner with relevant media both within and outside the archive that enriches the experience.

How does this project address information?
This project aimed to gather different sources of information with an aim of highlighting the role of women in the Chicano movement. Some of the information is original, such as the interviews with women. Some are artifacts from the time period that have been digitized. Some of this collected information has in turn been used for collaborative projects to create digital presentations or research papers related to this topic area. In essence, it is a storehouse for information that is also staying alive through its use by others which is reflected within the site.

How well does this project handle information?.
There is not much consistency across how the various points of information are presented to the user. For example, the experience of video interviews from one site is markedly different from an all search which will bring up essays that include images from their archive. The archive of objects itself does not seem straightforward to search or browse, but is rather, dispersed throughout the site. However, these sources of information are used quite well in the ambitious Chicana Diasporic research hub to tell the story of this movement through these women’s perspectives.